SDN permits the management of network services by network administrators through the abstraction of lower level functionality. The network control plane, which makes decisions about where traffic is sent, is decoupled from the underlying data plane that forwards traffic to the selected destination. The network control plane becomes directly programmable. The underlying infrastructure can be abstracted from applications and network services.
A network using a software defined networking controller node requires a finite amount of time to spawn a new virtual machine (VM) network node in the event of a node failure or congestion. The elapsed time required to create the new node and advertise its existence to the necessary domain name system (DNS) servers is often on the order of minutes to tens of minutes. There is therefore a need in the art to detect or predict network node failure or congestion long before that failure or congestion becomes critical.